Open Letter to the Biden Administration and US Congress Calling for Urgent High-Level US Leadership to Address Escalating Global COVID-19 Vaccine Crisis
The unprecedented wave of COVID-19 now engulfing India, Brazil, and other nations—and the extreme and widening global inequities in access to vaccines—test our collective conscience and threaten our national security. Worsening mass illness and deaths, a preventable humanitarian catastrophe, are destabilizing, and projected to increase. Urgent action is required to stem global circulation of the virus and the consequent inevitable emergence of new variants, which threaten to undermine Americans’ hard-fought but fragile vaccine immunity, putting lives and economic recovery at risk. President Biden has promised to restore American leadership abroad. The world is now in great need of high-level engagement that up to now has been conspicuously absent—to mitigate death and suffering in the short term, chart a sustained exit from the COVID-19 pandemic in the medium term, and insure…